“Wednesday’s announcement from the Bank of Canada that the country may indeed be in a recession certainly will not bode well for the Conservative Party’s fortunes,” said Frank Graves of EKOS Research.

With 40 per cent of Canadians saying the economy is their primary concern, this development is bad news for the Tories — ironically, as they have made their purported strength on economic issues a central point in their pitch for re-election.

“The prime minister’s less-than-luminescent personality requires him to deliver on economics,” Tyler Chamberlin of the University of Ottawa told iPolitics last week. “The party knows this intimately, and probably used the word ‘jobs’ more during the last campaign than they did either ‘Canada’ or ‘Harper’.”

After months of bad news on the economy, more voters are now ‘angry’ (31 per cent) than ‘discouraged’ (29 per cent), ‘hopeful’ (20 per cent) or ‘happy’ (12 per cent) with the prime minister. This is the first time EKOS’s data have shown ‘anger’ as the leading emotion for Stephen Harper; for most of 2015, ‘anger’ has trailed ‘discouraged’ but has been in a dogfight with ‘hopeful’.

While the number of voters who are ‘happy’ with Harper has held steady in the low teens since the beginning of this year, those who are ‘angry’ with him have risen from 22 per cent to 31 per cent over the same time period.

The Conservatives have tried to blame the recent economic downturn on external factors — Greece and China — while casting themselves as Canadians’ best choice to navigate the choppy waters. After the Bank of Canada’s interest rate cut on Wednesday, the Prime Minister’s Office immediately issued a dire warning about the threat posed by Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau.

But the Conservatives’ strategy might be missing the point, suggests Graves.

“Canadians have not felt a significant improvement in their standing of living (since 2011),” he said. “Instead, the economy is seen as being in recession and the vast majority of Canadians actually see themselves as stagnant or as worse off.”